Day 2 “Why did God give you two ears and one mouth?”

We began the morning with more leadership training. We were asked to discuss the time we were part of great team. This one was frighteningly tough for me. While many of the guys discussed their winning high school football team or Army unit I was left to consider if getting a varsity letter for swimming the breaststroke actually counted as a team activity. The point of the exercise was to get us to think about what makes a good team.

Then we watched a film featuring one of the greatest team leaders god has ever seen fit to bestow upon a school of god: Lou Holtz. Lou reminds me a lot of Ross Perot. He shouts everything he says, he has a declarative style that discourages questions, while encouraging confusion and he slings that home spun wisdom like it was whisky to the Irish. WIN apparently is an anagram for What’s Important Now. And God gave us two ears and one mouth so we could listen twice as much as we speak. In my immaturity I began riffing on Mr. Holtz, thinking things like “God gave us two eyes and two nostrils so we could smell everything we see.”

After the wisdom of Lou Holtz we discussed how the burden of communication is on the listener. This seemed a bit backwards to me. Such sentiments give idiots license to say all sort of idiotic things and then beg off with the phrase, “Well that’s not what I meant, you’re not listening.” Case in point, we were given an example of how a hyperbusy husband once told his equally hyperbusy spouse “We need a wife.” The wife apparently didn’t appreciate this comment, but maybe that’s because she wasn’t shouldering her burden as the listener.

This was followed by putting jigsaw puzzles together as a group. Each group of four was given a puzzle and each member had their own responsibility: one person to sort, one to put the puzzle together and one to oversee the project. I we worked together to assemble our portrait of a butterfly alighting upon a cluster of flowers, the instructor would add impediments to our progress such as work gloves, or dark safety glass. Putting a puzzle together with gloves on is pretty tough. This was supposed to help us accept the difficulties that safety regulations sometimes put upon us. Point taken.

In the end I was confused as to why we were having leadership training when the purpose of this course was to get an entry level position in the wind industry. But considering that it is a relatively new industry I could end up a leader with little warning.

When we got back from lunch we were introduced to Work Keys. Work Keys is essentially a computer administered skills test, broken into three categories: applied math, locating information, and reading for comprehension. Those who complete the exam are given ratings that range from Bronze to Platinum. The joker of the classroom announced that he would be getting the brown award. Good scores on the math test were required for this particular program. After working through the obligatory “How to use this program” program, I moved to the pretest for math. I only scored a six out of a possible seven on the pre-test. This meant that a bit of review was in order. The test itself was largely occupational word problems. “Company A charges you $0.06 per kilowatt hour. Company B charges you $0.04 per kilowatt hour, plus a $15.00 monthly charge. You use 1000 kilowatt hours per month. Which is the better deal?”

While we were working through our training modules, the woman helping us with the work skills tests asked us about our color personalities. She asked if there were any blues in the classroom. I pretended to be absorbed in the skills tests on my monitor. But a fellow student pointed to me and said I was a blue. The woman asked me if I was in the right industry. Good question.